Are We That Good? Has Binge-Watching Made Us Better — Or Worse — TV Watchers?

The ongoing BBC Canada show Orphan Black features over five-no-ten-no-fifteen male and female clones throughout its reign, marking the most female roles played by a single woman (Tatiana Maslany) on television, and also a daring proposition by its creators: keep up, because, well, we’ll keep adding characters. It seems part of modern drama’s supreme task: the want to create psychologically complex, and, nevertheless, briskly paced content in order to compete with — you guessed it — other shows of its kind. The amount of “complicated” shows on television is part and parcel of our ubiquitous access to digital content of all kinds and the need for this access to mean something more than just saturated fat entertainment; it has to deliver, and it has to give us talking points.

Shows like The Sopranos, Mad Men, The Wire, and so on, all of which have been expounded in furious detail in many other articles, are some of the first top-quality purveyors of long-form TV that are not only entertaining but smart, psychological, and crafty. These shows entered the public’s eye prior to the days of streaming, so a lot of their viewership was limited to the episode/week formula, a rest stop for past viewers, and what seems like an eternity today. If the stats in this Variety article are correct, and drama is the most binge-watched genre, has binge-watching these exhaustive and otherwise deserving shows made us better or worse audience members? Is watching as much as possible — thus connecting one to the single continent of binge-watchers united — a compulsion akin to “I came, I saw, I conquered?” Does it come with a tourist-like t-shirt?

Take your greatest TV-watching friend. Mine is an uncharacteristically reticent musician, until, that is, he’s quoting television or movies; then, he cannonballs from episode to episode, robotically rehashing plot lines and quotes. This friend — mine, yours, ours — will always be a great TV watcher, regardless of his consumption, and that’s because, simply, he has an amazing gift of memory. But for most of us, the guilt experienced for missing out on TV is equal to not thoroughly paying attention to a show because one is distracted by the prospect of jumping into a new one. It’s one big, fat catch-22.

It may be something different, too. Christopher Roberson, a film professor at NYU Tisch School of the arts, says, “It used to be how you good your memory was of an episode by quoting a favorite character or providing the name of an obscure extra, but now it’s about how good your playlist is or your dank meme stash is or how you end a work email with an oddly appropriate gif featuring Philip J. Fry.”

What I take Roberson to mean is that our memories have somehow been so overloaded by content that we have had to become the personal DJs of our own mental collections — diving into particular shows and pausing, coming up for the air, for others when the time is right. We count on a large reference base to keep up with our peers, so when they drop a reference as serious as Steven Avery (Making a Murderer) or as silly as Mr. Peanutbutter (BoJack Horseman) we are not left in the dark.

The dark is akin to video store lines and cable TV blackouts. So removed are these days of VHS and TV guides that even typing about them makes me wistful, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t say I missed them, if only because they kept me honest about my consumption: they provided a limit. Or maybe it’s that you had to work harder to watch what you wanted, and I, generally, feel like a poor-TV citizen when there are so many shows at my fingertips and I elect to, well, read.

So, rather incredulously, I ask Johnny, 39, a café worker who I bump into daily, tell me again how many shows you’re watching right now? Ten, he says, and lists all of them. Power, Ballers, Ray Donovan… Love and Hip-Hop, he timidly adds. It all feels like a lot. But then I tally the shows I’m currently wedded too, and by God if it’s not more than I thought: six — not quite Johnny’s number — but more than I thought I had the time (and attention span) for. Johnny, for what it’s worth, watches many of these shows on his cell phone on his break from work, so, if he misses something he just rewinds. That simple. The same device he “rewinds” on holds the key to another show just a finger tap away.

For someone like Matt C., 40, whom I messaged over Twitter, one show at a time is enough. But that just means faster watching, more to catch up on. Matt wrote to me, “I binge-watched the first four seasons of Breaking Bad in about two weeks. First three seasons of Game of Thrones in a week. My wife and I watched all six seasons of Friday Night Lights over about six months. How I Met Your Mother over a year. Parks and Rec over about six months.” Though his responses were texts, I imagined him verbalizing them with poise and candor, like there would be nothing wrong with this type of freneticism.

And maybe there isn’t. This type of normalcy is all too common with the binge-watchers I talk to. They have an order, a mise en scène appreciation of their art. Katy Ann Gonzalez, 26, who works for a major television network as part of the nightshift crew, says her work computer is part work and part entertainment center. She and the handful of other employees burning the midnight oil watch multiple shows per night on their computer screens. For Katy Ann, it’s usually “something light, like Seinfeld or The Big Bang Theory, just something to have on in the background.” Her other obsessions — Game of Thrones and other character-driven dramas — are reserved for when she’s alone, when she has to “pay attention.” She views television shows as existing on a spectrum, and judges them, she says, indiscriminately. This is funny, since she has such a molded notion of which shows she needs to pay attention to and which she does not, although this is a personal realization, one that she holds dear only because she knows herself so well. As far as hearing people’s opinions about popular shows, she has little patience. For her, TV — and, honestly, let’s call it what it is, streaming — exists as an elixir, a way to calm her down. “I’ve gotten to this point where I can’t deal with silence,” she says. “Music doesn’t provide the same warmth as a voice or a laugh track. My job gets lonely.”

Katy Ann concedes — and she’s the only one out of the many people I talked to — that her memory of all of a show’s details is sometimes hazy, since she doesn’t give herself time to digest anything. After all, some nights feel really long and there are a lot of shows to watch.

Not Lucas Schlager, also 26, who has “a very robust working long-term memory for this kind of stuff.” And which stuff? The stuff our modern day tuning in…the thirty minute digestible comedies, the long-form complicated dramas, the “stuff” of the moment and the “stuff” of our generation’s legacy. All are part of our revolving mental catalogues. Lucas says, “As time-shifting (i.e. via the DVR) became possible in the early ’00s, I basically stopped watching things ‘on-schedule.’ Although the initial draw of the DVR was commercial-skipping, the time shifting aspect became the killer app (at least for me). Pretty much stopped watching stuff ‘on time’ after that.” Lucas is big on this stuff, because this stuff is everything. It’s all of the content at our fingertips at any time. Perhaps, to put it in real speak for me, he adds, “No one wants to be the one at work yelling ‘no spoiler please’ for such cultural phenomenons as Game of Thrones.”

And, perhaps to satisfy our nostalgia-fueled souls, since entertainment — even streaming — reminds us that we can still have water cooler conversations about our favorite shows, we can imagine all of our different binge-watchers looking at a single, fixed object, like a star in the sky, though it’s at different times in which they are all looking. It may even be a different sky. Roberson, the NYU professor, sees this spectacle, too, finding it beautifully simple despite its intricate web: “What might be more important is our ability to share content in a way that makes a fan an active participant. Parts of that episode exist disembodied and transformed into gifs and memes or mashups and can be effortlessly shared via Facebook or an email or a text message or an instant message or you wrote about it on Tumblr or it’s on one of your boards on Pinterest or liked on your Instagram. We are better watchers than previous generations because for the first time ever we can participate in a way that makes us micro-showrunners, curating content and our experiences.”

Matthew Daddona is a writer and editor who lives in Brooklyn. His most recent writings have appeared in Outside Magazine, Tin House, The Rumpus, and Literary Hub, among other places. He currently co-hosts Kill Genre, a New York-based reading series.